Letters.

Sprawl Talk

In his review of several books on suburbia ("Room to Grow," February), Sam Staley contends that sprawl-and-mall suburbs are simply what people want and implies that any alternative is bound to be something bossy and over-planned like Celebration, Florida. This claim strikes me as simplistic and a historical.

Forty years ago, in The Death and Life of the Great American Cities, the great Jane Jacobs laid waste to the idea that a town or city can be built like a machine. She showed that the "ethnic" urban neighborhoods that the planners wanted to tear down were models of community in action, not deplorable "slums." She also showed that the planners were stuck in a Newtonian "two-variable" view of the world and had not entered the era when science attempts to deal with "organized complexity" (ecology, information theory). There is the same debate today in forestry, where the environmental community sees a forest as an interwoven set of biological systems of awe-inspiring complexity, while the timber industry sees a forest as a "tree farm."

It is somewhat fashionable to defend contemporary sprawling suburbs as somehow the spontaneous result of people doing their thing. Those who believe otherwise are accused of advocating the sort of planning Ms. Jacobs deplored. This theory ignores the extent to which sprawl development is the result of deliberate government policy, both federal and local. Tax law, lending regulations, and numerous perversities in planning, zoning, and tax codes, all contribute to some of the worst features of sprawl development: its waste of land, its artificial separation of functions (you can't walk down to the store or to a movie) and its transportation nightmares (work is further and further away-there are people in California who commute for four hours a day).

There are restrictions and there are restrictions. Without urban growth boundaries such as those Portland has so wisely adopted, much of the open space and natural beauty that most Americans treasure will be lost. (I note that it is voters who are putting in UGBs by referendum-politicians and bureaucrats tend to resist them.) So planning is needed, but not the totalitarian kind of either the Disney traditionalists or the New Deal modernists. We need planning that makes more room, not less, for people to do their thing in their many and varied ways. Planning that is based on the way people are in the real world, not on what officials and bureaucrats think...